Monday, January 21, 2008

One of the pitiful excuses Golden Boy Barry's sycophants offer to try to explain away his increasingly embarassing support of right-wing positions is that he has to use this kind of language to thread his way through the media minefield, or that he's actually fooling the big dummies on the right that he's not dangerous to them, or that he's really using brilliant rhetorical strategy to twist the right wing's words into really good progressive goals. Which leads Krugman (and the rest of us) to ask why doesn't he just say what he means and strongly defend progressive policies, objectives and goals? Which then brings up the extremely embarassing fact that Hillary is simply more progressive than Barry, exploding the fairy tale that The Golden One's followers blindly believe:

So, Candidate A says things like this:

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

If you go back and look at our history, we were most successful when wehad that balance between an effective, vigorous government and a dynamic, appropriately regulated market. And we have systematically diminished the role and the responsibility of our government, and we have watched our market become imbalanced. I want to get back to the appropriate balance of power between government and the market … Inequality is growing. The middle class is stalled. The American dream is premised on a growing economy where people are in a meritocracy and, if they’re willing to work hard, they will realize the fruits of their labor.

And somehow many people believe that Candidate A is the true progressive — he wasn’t really saying that Reagan was right — and that Candidate B, despite the progressive talk, is just Bush the third.

These people could be right; politicians have been known to say things they don’t believe. But where does their certainty come from?

Sauce for goose is sauce for gander time. If everything HRC says is nothing but soulless pandering to keep herself in power, why isn't that true of Obama, too? If what he says is not pandering for right-wing votes, then what is it? In short, why does everything HRC says get cast in the worst possible light, even when backed up by a legislative record that shows she fights for progressive policy, while Barry gets a free pass for egregiously anti-progressive crap?

Hillary doesn't have to pander to the right. She states right up front what she's going to do and lets the right go suck eggs if they don't like it.